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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Announced in a Steamworks Development blog post by Valve, they mentioned both Brazilian and German laws require content ratings for people to find age-appropriate content. However, there's been an ongoing legal debate as to whether that applied to new games only or to the back catalogue of older games too. Now the German regulatory authority BZKJ has "expressed to us their interpretation of the law applies to all games on Steam, including ones that were launched before the law came into effect".

So developers will now need to ensure their games have a rating to continue to be sold in Germany. The good news for developers, is that Steam has its own built-in rating system they can go opt to use, or game devs can go directly through the BZKJ.

For developers that released a game before January 2020, they may not have filled out the questionnaire for Valve's rating system, so they will need to go back and do it for their games.

All older games being sold in Germany on Steam now require a content rating

For game developers that want to continue selling games in Germany, they'll need to ensure they actually have a content rating, including for older games.

www.gamingonlinux.com

 

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Germany is kinda poopy in content ratings. I remember a time when there weren't any Swastikas in World War 2 games in Europe because Germany didn't want them.
It also sounds fishy to have a law retroactively applied. Let's say Germany would suddenly criminalize prostitution, and then retroactively fine/sue past customers. I doesn't make any sense.

 

[Shut0wen]

Hitler really did fuck up german gaymers, feel bads man

 

[BaldingAshCrimson]

Hitler really did fuck up german gaymers, feel bads man

I love your profile pic.

 

[Hudo]

Hitler really did fuck up german gaymers, feel bads man

Nah, it would've been the same even without Hitler. It's just the easiest topic for conservatives to latch onto in order to appeal to old people "look! I am doing something to protect the children!". It's basically free PR, in a sense. Since the video game industry lobby here is inconsequential and the average age of people in the CDU is like 65 or so.

This shit will sort itself out when all the old fucks finally die off and people who played games in their youth take over.

 

[Mr Hyde]

Good. Video games are filth that shouldn't be consumed by anyone.

 

[delfrickintree]

It's GamerCaust 2.0 !!

 

[T-Cake]

This is nuts - some developers never go back to their older games. Such examples are using out-of-date artwork which doesn't present properly in the library view, no information on controller support, not even cloud saves!